Death in Kansas
By TONY TANNER
AFTER all, every sort of shouting is a transi- tory thing. It is the grim silence of facts that remains' (Conrad). On November 15, 1959, in Holcomb, Kansas, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith shot the four members of the Clutter family for no apparent motive, purpose or profit. Brute fact. And starting from the meaningless horror of that night, Capote has gathered together groups and clusters of related facts so that the sudden bout of blood-spilling is retrieved from its status as an isolated fact and provided with a complex context in which it becomes the focal point of converging narratives.* Capote works on the valid assumption that a fact is simply a moment in an on-going sequence, that it ramifies in all directions, and that to appreciate something of the full import of any incident you must see as much of the sequence and as many of the ramifi- cations as possible. He has done this for the Clutter murders and now presents his version of the revealing sequence.
Thoreau wrote: 'I would so state facts that they shall' be significant, shall be myths or mythologic' and Capote is continuing an old American tradi- tion when he tries to get at the 'mythic' signi- ficance of the facts by simply stating them. It is a tradition based on the belief that 'if men would steadily observe realities only' they would dis- cover that 'reality is fabulous' (again the words are Thoreau's); a tradition which reaches back to Emerson and encompasses writers like Hem- ingway, Sherwood Anderson, and William Carlos Williams. Capote's contribution to this tradition, judging by the tremendous popularity of this book in America, seems to have been to extract a black fable from contemporary reality which has a peculiar relevance for his society.
By juxtaposing and dovetailing the lives and values of the Clutters and those of the killers, Capote produces a stark image of the deep double- ness in American life. For here is a 'true' parable of the outlaw against the community; the roving life of random impulse cutting across the stable respectability of continuous ambition; the gang- ster versus the family man. It is many other things as well. Dangerous footloose dreamers intruding on sober industrious farmers; the maimed and lethal throw-outs of society pouncing, as from a black nowhere, on to the prosperous pillars of the community; the terrible meeting of the cursed and the blessed of America.
Perhaps most graphically it is a collision be- tween the visible rewards and the suppressed horrors of American life which resulted in four people splattered all over their imposing 'lovely home' and two more hanging from the gallows. It is the American dream turning into an Ameri- can nightmare. Clearly this feeling of the frighten- ing double life of America goes very deep. Norman Mailer wrote in one of The Presidential Papers: 'Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground.' On one level is the life of the ordinary, respectable, money-making community =concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull'; 'and there is a subterranean river of un- • IN COLD BLOOD. By Truman Capote. (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.)
tapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.' Capote's story corroborates this vision of the two rivers of American life.
Thus by constructing the last day in the life of the Clutters, Capote gives us a sort of shorthand summary of the respectable surface of American life in its most extreme form. Mr. Clutter ('eminent Republican and church leader", rigidly abstemious and harshly intolerant of all users of tobacco and alcohol, surveys his land, helps a neighbour, takes out an insurance policy. Nancy, his pretty, popular daughter, having acted in Toni Sawyer the night before, teaches another girl to make cherry-pie, works on bridesmaids' dresses for her sister's wedding, does errands, has her boy friend round to watch television. Her brother Kenyon messes around in his carpentry den and does some gardening. Life for them all is 'organ- ised,' just as their surroundings are `so tended and cared for.' Yet even here, perhaps all is not well within the citadel of respectability. Mrs. Clutter has nervous attacks and sleeps apart from her husband; there is a hint that Mr. Clutter has taken to the solace of secret cigarettes—while Nancy is a compulsive nail-biter. Their dog is a coward. Still, as Capote fills in the details of the town and community around them, we get a sense of a life which is worthy and decent enough, even if some- what desolate, self-righteous and dull.
The killers, by contrast, inhabit a different world even if it is on the same continent. A world, for a start, of endless travel and move- ment (they have both been smashed up in serious road accidents). We first see Perry Smith Can in- cessant conceiver of voyages') hunched over a well-used map, and we follow both of them into Kansas, down to Mexico, out to California, back to Florida, on to Kansas where, incredibly, they returned, thence to Las Vegas where they were caught. It is a world also of wild private dreams, particularly for Perry who dreams of becoming a night-club singer, and of diving for buried treasure (he has already bought the maps), although with his crippled legs he cannot even swim. It is a world where violence is accepted with a casual indifference which covers God knows what sort of suppressed hysteria (they roared with laughter as they drove away from the Clutter household, their clothes dripping blood). A world of scavenging, stolen cars, dirty flop- houses; of rough temporary loyalties, bitter lone- liness, and futile rancour. And also the dangerous unreason of the beaten-down, the left-behind. Hickock and Smith are not unique, as is revealed by the number of other horrendous mass murders Capote has occasion to mention. They are part of what society is producing at the same time as it is producing the Clutters. And by marshalling the facts of their lives, Capote takes us a bit nearer to the abysmal mystery of that moment when, not in greed and not in anger, indeed almost as a 'dare,' Perry Smith slipped his knife into Mr. Clutter's throat.
Perry is the most interesting character in the book. Capote of course has always had a feeling for the loner, the lost one, the unloved, the father- less, and in Perry Smith he found someone with a lite which made his powers of invention redun- dant (although his romantic feeling for the type emerges in the imagery he provides for Perry; in the court 'he looked as lonely and inappropriate as a seagull in a wheatfield'). He was a half-breed and was pushed around through a life of much misery and no love (a brother and sister com- mitted suicide), a life mainly of blows received (in an orphanage the nuns punished him for bed- wetting by beating him with a flashlight, immers- ing him in freezing water, and putting stinging ointment on his penis). The blows were stored up —bound to erupt in some wild act of irrational violence at a later date. Thus, chillingly, he had absolutely no feelings against the Clutters at all, and chatted kindly to them before he shot them. ('They never hurt me. Like other people. Like people have all my life. Maybe it's just that the Clutters were the ones who had to pay for it.') But Perry was also sensitive and had artistic in- clinations. Most touching is his personal treasure trove, his box of memorabilia which he carts around wherever he goes. It held not only his Korean War medal, but lyrics and songs, note- books containing lists of 'beautiful' or 'useful' words, and a diary full of interesting facts and quotations. Sad tokens of hopeless, inchoate literary ambitions. His last words on the gallows apparently were : 'Maybe I had something to con- tribute, something . . .' He emerges as not only a pathetic, but a sympathetic figure, an unwanted crippled dreamer whose moment of appalling violence was somehow not of his own making. One might compare one's feelings in reading the factual report on Lee Oswald, another messed-up failure lashing out at the supreme symbol of American success. Horror, certainly—but also a sort of stunned compassion.
There is no doubt that Capote has written a remarkable book, a book which, casting its net wide, does draw together some terribly revealing facts about America. But a word about his tech- nique is in order. He claims to have written a 'Non-Fiction Novel,' to have assembled only facts derived from observation, official records, and interviews. He does not comment, he presents; he does not analyse, he arranges. This means, for one thing, that he cannot approach the profound inquiring insights into the significance of the psychopath offered by, for example, Musil in his analytic study of Moosbrugger. However, since his material is 'true,' it has its own kind of power- ful impact : the illusion is of art laying down its tools as helpless and irrelevant in front of the horrors and mysteries of life itself. But I find something just a shade suspicious in this main- tained illusion of objective factual presentation. Certainly it is in the American grain—'pleads for itself the fact,' said Emerson. But facts do not 'sing themselves,' as Emerson maintained. Facts are silent, as Conrad said, and any singing they do depends on their orchestration by a human arranger.
As Goethe insisted, there is no such thing as pure objectivity. 'Looking at a thing gradually merges into contemplation, contemplation into thinking, thinking is establishing connections and thus it is possible to say that every attentive glance which we cast on the world is an act of theorising.' The way Capote 'establishes connec- tions' reveals his subjective feeling about the world he presents, and this should not be over- looked. It is, for instance, Capote who mani- pulates some of the very melodramatic contrasts and ironies by his selective juxtapositions (e.g., from seeing Perry hunched up with pain in a toilet, we cut straight to Nancy Clutter's bed- room and a prominent pink Teddy-bear). It is Capote who provides some of the atmospheric
detail. Thus when the police open up Perry's case: 'A cockroach emerged, and the landlady Stepped on it, squashing it under the heel of her gold leather sandal.' It did? I wonder. Isn't it rather that behind the mask of the dispassionate reporter we can begin to make out the excited stare of the southern-gothic novelist with his febrile delight in weird settings and lurid details (the red ball bouncing down the stairs in Other Rooms, Other Voices)? There are other such details, not the least dubious being the 'reminiscence' accredited to Detective Dewey as he watches Perry hang. This ends the book and, if this were a plain novel, it would be regarded as pretty cheap and senti- mental. 'If' is, of course, the point. Because 'if' this were a novel one might be more liable to notice the lapses into bad and clichid writing ('The de- tective's trained eye roamed the scrubbed and humble room') and a marked penchant, not wholly pleasing, for just that arrangement or schematisation of details which will make life appear at its most queasily macabre.
I am not saying that Capote has twisted the facts so that life appears as a Capote novel. But tampering there has been, and a subtle exploita- tion or highlighting of ghastly or pathetic effects which leaves me feeling a little uneasy about the enormous appeal of this book (rather as I am made uneasy by those 'art' films about concentra- tion camps). Say what he will, Capote has mani- pulated the facts to produce a particular kind of frisson. The great novels about a criminal act— by Dostoievsky, Stendhal, etc.—may be initially provoked by an actual reported crime. But by making their works frankly 'fictions' they tacitly assumed that to explore the latent significance of the grim, silent facts, the most valuable aid is the human imagination. I cannot see that Capote goes anywhere near to proving them wrong.
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